Betty Gets Lazy

The cover of Betty Crocker's Dinner Parties (7th printing, 1978) promises all kinds of plans, including those for "impromptu suppers."

While there are recipes for more complicated menus (like the homemade lasagna on the cover), the first menu in this cookbook is definitely of the "impromptu supper" type.

The Deli Dinner in Disguise is not joking about the "deli" part. This is just a deli run slightly disguised by light personalization-- the kind of instruction I don't imagine '70-s cooks as even needing. The barbecued deli chicken is just that:

A reheated barbecued chicken from the deli. The cook can brush it "with bottled Italian salad dressing or barbecue sauce" before reheating to make it slightly easier to pretend that this isn't just reheated deli chicken.

The Hot Spiced Fruit 'n Melon?

A can of "fruits for salad" (I'm assuming this is an attempt to make fruit cocktail sound fancy) combined with a jar of watermelon pickles and a little allspice. The cook does have to heat it up so it's clear they exerted some effort beyond opening the packages.

The Garden Patch Coleslaw is-- you guessed it!-- dressed-up deli coleslaw.

It's "garden patch" because it has a bag of defrosted peas dumped in (plus a little Italian dressing to keep the dressing ratio sufficient).

My favorite item in the menu is probably the Onion Rolls.

I love them primarily because the cook is supposed to cut each roll into 3 strips and then reassemble them before heating them in the oven. I have absolutely no clue why the rolls should be hacked up and reassembled. The cut surfaces are not spread with butter and seasonings, as I assumed they would be when I initially saw they were being cut into strips. It doesn't seem like cutting the rolls into thirds will help that that much in distributing the six rolls evenly among four diners. (If that were the goal, cutting them into halves or quarters would have been a better choice.) This strip-cutting is just random, pointless busywork as far as I can tell. Betty Crocker must have gotten tired of trying to think of things to do to make items from the deli seem at least kinda homemade and just said, "I don't know! Cut them into little strips?" when she got to this "recipe." She was done with this menu before she was done with this menu. It's good to know that even symbols of domesticity sometimes got sick of pretending to care.